-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 54
User Manual
=== Seeks proxy & configuration === For proxy configuration, refer to the Seeks_Configuration page.
Seeks can be setup for a remote access. Take a look on Seeks_On_Web.
Seeks enables metasearch on top of existing search engines. That is, for every query, Seeks grabs results from a (configurable) set of search engines. It aggregates and rerank them based on consensus among engines, before returning them to the user.
On top of this, Seeks proposes a small set of tools for enhancing the websearch experience. These include, similarity analysis, automatic clustering, sorting per title, url ane result types, next result pages preload, content caching.
These tools, when and how to use them for squeezing more out of websearch is detailed below.
'''NEW''': on versions >= 0.2.2 the most discriminative words in every snippets are highlighted in blue.
When accessing a Seeks node, whether locally, or remotely, the top bar displays some (optional) information about the node: software version, hostname, IP address, enabled options (content analysis, clustering, ...), the admin contact address, and the node's time when the page was generated.
Seeks UI provides several classic and some experimental tools for websearch.
From left to right, the search form, the expansion button, the clustering button, the (previous and) next page button(s), the home button, and a set of sorting links (urls, titles & types).
At any time after having used any of the tools listed above, you can reset your websearch to the original first page of results by hitting the ''Seeks'' button.
Seeks websearch philosophy is slightly different than that of other search engines. The search form works exactly like any other websearch form. Simply type in your query and click the Seeks button. However, this search form supports some additional User-Manual_Seeks_Bubs-0.2-SOLO#In-query_language_commands.
Moreover, Seeks works by incrementally expanding your websearch to lower rank results. The level of expansion is indicated on the Expansion button.
- '''Tip''': ''Perform your websearch, if none of the results seem satisfying, hit the Expansion button. Seeks will aggregate more and more results every time you hit the Expansion button.''
Use the Previous and Next button to navigate among the results, by page. Navigation should be fast as the results are cached by Seeks. Note that the more expanded is your websearch the more pages you can navigate through.
Every result snippet comes with a '''similarity''' link. Clicking on it puts this snippet on top of the list, then re-ranks all other results in decreasing similarity order from this result. Seeks computes the similarity either by using the textual summary contained in the result snippet, either by downloading the page content and processing it. For the later, see the required Seeks_Configuration#enabling_background_content_analysis.
- '''Tip''': ''Often you cannot find a direct answer to your query within the few first results. Find the first result that looks like it may contain a plausible answer. Then use the similarity link to sort the result by decreasing similarity to this link. More interesting similar results should jump up in the page''.
After using similarity, a ''Back'' link allows you to come back to the original list of results. Alternatively you can click on the ''Seeks'' button, that has the same effect.
Seeks allows to sort and group result snippets either by urls, titles or types.
Grouping by urls or by titles is sometimes useful, but the most interesting feature is clearly the grouping by types.
- '''Tip''': ''grouping by types is very useful. Videos, wikis, files, and more are put together. This eases most of the search of pertinent results''.
Types grouping uses regular expressions. It is not too difficult to tweak the default parameters in order to define your own types. In future versions, Seeks will provide a simple extension framework for easing the personalization of types.
Clustering is an experimental feature. Depending on feedback, it may stay or not in future stable releases of Seeks.
However, we believe it can be useful. What clustering does is to automatically regroup results that seems similar given their textual content. Additionally, it computes a textual label for every cluster. Sometimes these labels are hardly useful, sometimes they are truly interesting.
More importantly clicking on any cluster label augments your query with the label words, and performs that query. This sometimes proves useful.
-
'''Tip''': ''Expand your websearch a bit before clusterizing your results''.
-
'''Tip''': ''Use clustering when your are not too sure of what you are looking for, or when your query words are very approximate. Clustering will produce several groups of results and label them. Sometimes labels can be helpful for generating more precise queries.
-
'''Tip''': ''Pushing the Clusterize button several times increments the default number of clusters and can modify the results''.
Seeks supports in-query language commands of the type <code>:fr</code>, <code>:en</code>, <code>:de</code>, ... See some Tips_%26_Troubleshooting#I_don.27t_get_search_results_in_the_language_I_want.